Bacardi Ad: The Outsider

Number 4 in Bacardi’s series of short films/long ads has hit YouTube this morning. In the interest of disclosure, Think Espionage, the agency that produced these films, invited me to attend the premiere at Tales of the Cocktail on Thursday afternoon, while munching on tasty treats and sipping a Cuba Libre mixed by Bacardi Global Ambassador David Cordoba. Disclaimer aside, I enjoy the hell out of this ad. Filmed at a real bar in London (though the speakeasy front is a fiction), the film differs from the previous three in that it stars an actual bartender, Nicolas Saint-Jean.

Its almost as much of an advertisement for flair in craft cocktailing as it is for bacardi. A jigger is typically not the first item thought of being used in a flair exhibition although you wouldn’t know from this video

Jake, that’s an interesting comment because it’s right on target. You nailed exactly what Think Espionage, Bacardi, and (especially) Nicolas Saint-Jean intended this video to convey: it truly is possible to be both a flair bartender and a craft cocktailian at the same time. As a flair bartender, Saint-Jean has said he’s sometimes treated as an outsider in the craft community, hence the name of the video.

What I appreciate about this most is that he largely nails just what I expect when I order a Cuba Libre. Leaving aside the choice of rum, my only quibble with his technique is that I think a Cuba Libre needs about twice as much lime juice as he added. But that’s it. Otherwise, he prepared a Cuba Libre you’d expect from a respected craft cocktail bar: hand-cut ice, fresh juice, jiggered pour, cola from a bottle instead of a gun.

On the vanilla bean note… I’m not sure that’s a vanilla bean. If so, it’s VERY fat. What I immediately thought I was seeing was either licorice root or a sassafras stick. But when Hombre Secreto started drinking out of it, I was thrown for a loop. With sassafras being so long out-of-fashion (due to FDA regulations), it does make sense that someone might try to bring it back in style. Perhaps someone whittled a hole through the middle, and they were marinated to keep them from drying out? Or… it could just be a really fat vanilla bean.

I was also thinking: if you’ve got precision pour-spouts on your bottle, then why are you bothering to use a jigger?

I’ve ordered hundreds of highballs in 20+ years of drinking–Rum and Coke, Jack and Coke, Jack and ginger, gin and tonic, etc. What always happens is the bartender walks away from me, fills a tall glass with ice, upends a spouted bottle over a glass, and then sprays mixer from a gun into the glass.

I have no idea what the “count” is on his spouted bottle. Some spouts are “precision pour,” with ball bearings that cut the bartender off at a certain point–a point that might insult me, the customer, more than a measured pour will.

Sometimes, I’m in the mood for that, and I don’t mind a cheapass ounce of well rum mixed with four ounces of Coke from a gun, with a brown, dried-out lime perched on the edge, just waiting for me to toss it to the floor.